Day two, but first a story from day one: in the 19th century towns held typesetting races where swifts from local newspapers and print shops would compete to claim victory as the fastest and then move on to bigger and bigger towns to challenge other swifts. Some became pretty famous nationally. The last race was in 1892, which was also the first year they allowed women to compete (and the women beat the men!) so was it bruised male ego or the advent of the linotype that spelled the death of the races?
Today we each chose one of our own poems to set and print and Barbara helped us choose the right font to match the feel we were after with the work. I’m learning my way around the California Job Case and it’s true, letterpress is like a musical instrument (or any craft for that matter): the more you practice and learn your instrument, the better you become at mastering the basics leaving time to spend on higher level creative decisions. For instance, things you struggle with at first, like locating the letters in the CA Job Case, start to become second nature and you’re grabbing e’s and a’s and i’s with no problem, only stopping to figure out where the less-used letters are stored (k!). And to quote the poetic text of Clifford Burke’s Printing Poetry: “If you know how to read music, you have an idea of the way to approach typesetting: the score is read several bars ahead of what the fingers translate into movement.” The whole process is pretty serene.
I’m just over half-way done with setting my poem text. I’m using a 12 pt Optima Roman type and am getting pretty adept at justifying my lines. Justifying is the process of filling up the empty spaces with quads to fill out the end of the line and create line tension; sometimes you have to use tiny brasses (1 pt. thick) and coppers (1/2 pt. thick). It’s all the more fun since my lines are rarely all flush left and move around the poem plane, so measuring and determining how many quads I need to keep indented lines uniform is making for some creative spacing solutions.
Today we had two speakers. The first was Amber McMillan of Post Editions who talked to us about her work with the Center and her path to learn how to be a good printer. She started with a background in the visual arts as a painter and had a book arts class which set her on this path to interning at the CBA and founding her own business and press. We got to see a variety of her work done for the Center’s chapbook series and broadsides series and heard a great deal about her process in making many of the examples she brought. It’s nice to see an artist’s obsessions, especially with Amber’s subtle touches and flourishes that have become her trademark.
Our second speaker was Regan Gradet who also spoke to us about her path to book-making, starting as a graphic designer and getting an MFA in book arts from the University of the Arts in Philly. Regan’s presentation highlighted three of her projects with the underlying theme of considering not just text type and the words, but the space and page layout, page and book size, the ink color, design elements and illustration, etc. Her first example was The Cynic: Part 116 which takes Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” and tells a story by reprinting the sonnet over and over again but crossing out the words, printing the words you need to read in blue to read the story contained within the poem. Regan’s inspiration was a tobacco tin where a kid scratched out words from the accompanying Price Edward’s ad to tell a dirty story.
Her second example was a “forged” journal of the Bordin sisters, conjoined sisters who write in a “conjoined” journal, or dosey-doe structure. She showed us two versions: her one-of-a-kind source text which is made from old fabrics and has a broken binding giving us the sense of its authenticity. Her next step is to make a facsimile edition for others to read the story of these girls being courted by Ringling Bros.
The last example was a book called The Darkest I’ve Never Not Seen which is her grandfather’s written account of being a G.I. in WWII. It’s an amazing story that he never shared until the end of his life. Regan edited the text to put the anecdotes in chronological order and found three distinct chapters: his life in basic training and shipping out; Europe at the backend of the war; Europe on the front lines. She also included sidebars which provided info and portraits of her grandfather’s G.I. buddies. And a design element choice: wind maps of the Atlantic to accompany chapter 1, and the topographical maps of Europe in chapters 2 and 3 that get more condensed and busy, competing with the text to convey the dire situation by the time we get to the front lines.
Tomorrow we finish typesetting our poems and start printing! I still need to figure out how I will do the title…